KDE 3.4 has been released today. "After more than a half year of development the KDE Project is happy to be able to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Among the many new features that have been incorporated, the improvements in accessibility are most remarkable." Read the full announcement for an overview of the many changes. You can download source and binary packages from download.kde.org or use the Konstruct automatic build tool.

Lars Stetten from the accessibility user group Linaccess said about the release: "The new accessibility features in KDE 3.4 are an important step for the future, to enable disabled people to get to know the KDE desktop and to join its community."

As well as the new accessiblity features major improvements have been made to KPDF, groupware server support for Kontact and Kopete, HAL support for detection of removable media and the inclusion of Akregator RSS feed reader. In total 6,500 bugs have been fixed and more than 1,700 wishlist items fulfilled.

Many thanks to all of KDE's hard working developers, translators and helpers.

Reading through the KDE 3.4 features list, I noticed this under Base/KWin:

"Support for the XComposite extension through managing a fork of xcompmgr. Including windows translucency depending on window state, configurable window shadows and fading effects on window mapping"

But I don't see anything in the highlights section about this...

Seems to me that if 3.4 introduced true alpha blending & real drop shadows, that would be quite a highlight. I'm guessing that the underlying support is now in place, but other aspects of the system still need to be updated?

Anyone know any details about this?

So, I guess my question is, how close are we to a 3D accelerated KDE with all the eye candy?

It's in there. If you go to window properties you'll see the config screen. When it works, it works quite well (assuming you've got a good video card). It looks great. However, I've found it to be quite unstable (the X extension.. not KDE).. it likes to crash quite often :)

(I'm running an nvidia card + drivers, which requires you to specifically enable both if you want both, via:
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
as well as turning on XComposite itself. I am running HEAD, and haven't had a crash for quite some time related to that.)

It can crash your X server. I experienced crashes in XFCE (I talk about XFCE because that was the only DE with composite support without patches), where I launch GL games. The game would refuse to run, the screen goes black and then, the X server crashes (and gdm restarts one).
Thet was with the precedent NVidia driver, I have not tested with the new one yet.
I suppose KDE will suffer the same fate if the new NVidia driver did not correct this.

Not a point IMHO. This might sound a bit harsh and I'm all
for user-oriented ungeeky OSS but by all
means: That's just not how OSS works. And I think that's
a good thing. It's just not how many things in life work today ;-)
You cannot remain unenlightened (i.e. let's face it: stupid) and at the same
time want to have the advantages. You must learn to seperate
the myths from the truth. Or you can say: Oh that's all too complicated
and... pay! So it's OK when KDE strives to be more user-friendly,
but when people activate an *experimental* Composite extension in the
xorg.conf and afterwards complain about KDE, well Good Riddance!
I wont expect any non-commercial entity to support such users in the
near future.
That's just like KDE says it supports i.e. USB 3.0 (just making this up)
and then you plug your cat at an USB port and fry it thoroughly and
complaing afterwards about KDE. That's really out of line if you ask me.

And YES, I AM volunteering to work on this. I will even try to be the leader if people want that. But, it is going to take a lot of work by a lot of developers to undo the mistakes that have been made.

A first step for applications developers is to try to follow our own standards:

well, lets hope it really won't use arts, but this so-called 4.0 feature plan seems to be the unfinished leftovers from 3.4 feature plan.
These changes, most possibly, will go into 3.5 (at least for arts- stuff; and if this branch will ever happen)

It will probably be replaced by kdemm, which is a more simple audio system than aRts, in that it only supports simple playback, stop, start and nothing much more. Advanced audio applications would then be based on separate libraries, for example the way amaroK works, or the way JuK supports both aRts and GStreamer. Also, be sure to read this "probably" as the dictionary describes it, noone is really certain yet ;)

Do remember that disties need at at least a month or so in order to compile and test KDE and other major apps for their releases. Mandrake especially spends a lot of time working at creating and applying patches to smooth things over, before releasing. They don't just download, compile and then dump things on the user :)

Hopefully there will be no more confusion and insanity in the development process than usuall. Next is 3.5, but this will mostly be an applications release with only minimal changes to the libs. This will give the developers who work on the core libs, time to stabilize the API for 4.0 prior to the porting of most of the applications. It also gives the application developers ability to work on new features, and they don't have to work against constantly changing libraries. Most of the application developers don't do much work in the libs, so insted of sitting around waiting for the libraries to stabilize for 4.0 they do 3.5.

there's many different idea's how to do this. The most sane i have heard is do 3.5, wait until qt4 is released and stable, then develop kde4 then, hopefully with some help from trollteck, although i dont think anybody has asked them if they would (presumably the developers would be free after finishing a major release and a good kde4 would help them advertise their product too).

Thats the best idea in my opinion, although it would require trollteck to donate developers which im not so sure they would do (fair enough, they're paying for their dev's)